


If You Leave Me You Are Lost

by aelibia



Category: Naruto
Genre: BAMF Haruno Sakura, Depression, F/F, F/M, Gaara catches feelings, Haruno Sakura-centric, Kinda depressing, One-Sided Haruno Sakura/Uchiha Sasuke, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, References to Depression, Sakura is mentored by strong women in her life, Sakura just needs to Leave okay, Valentine's Day Fic Exchange, World Travel, no betas we die like men, no one has ever used this poem in a fic before can you believe it, sakura has depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:54:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22722031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aelibia/pseuds/aelibia
Summary: Sakura learns to let go of her post-war troubles while wandering the world looking for purpose.
Relationships: Gaara/Haruno Sakura, Haruno Sakura & Konan, Haruno Sakura & Tsunade
Comments: 25
Kudos: 142





	If You Leave Me You Are Lost

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mouseymightymarvellous](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mouseymightymarvellous/gifts).



> Konan is alive because fuck this series
> 
> I am horny for female characters who say fuck it and just...leave. Title and transitional lines from “Song of the Open Road” by Walt Whitman, c h a m p i o n of the trend of rich people pretending to be poor for a while to get inspired by minimalism or whatever. This poem still fucks though.
> 
> Man winter really killed my emotions this year can I get an amen.

_Healthy, free, the world before me…_

* * *

Regrettably, the war left her with more weight than she could bear. She thought victory would feel like euphoria, an ecstasy branded into her skin so that all the world would see her joy and _know_. Every town they pass through on the way home cheers for them and she watches her teammates walk the hero’s path in their own ways: sheepishly, distantly, exuberantly. 

She stands off to the side and counts slabs of stone on a nearby house to tether her mind in the moment, afraid of drifting off. After a while, the children stop coming so near to her, frightened by the emptiness in her eyes. She drinks a glass of something Naruto hands to her and watches the way the golden liquid disappears from the container. From a darkened corner of the room, she watches herself.

* * *

_Leading wherever I choose…_

* * *

She returns to the hospital in Konoha because there’s nowhere else to be, and because less people bother her there. On the fourth day in a row that she stands in the break room for an hour, drifting in a haze of her own consciousness, Tsunade takes her gently by the arm. A nearby room serves as the former Hokage’s office; really, it was a supply closet, but the smell of alcohol wafting in the air proved it was well on its way to making it big in the world of room labels.

Tsunade doesn’t give her a big speech about self care and depression because Sakura knows all this, and Tsunade knows that she knows. It’s been a long while since they needed words between them for the critical moments. When Tsunade slides a mission briefing her way, Sakura nods and accepts, signing without reading the fine print. It’s a simple thing, an establishing meeting for a five-country committee on post-war medical intervention. More importantly, it’s away from _here_.

* * *

_I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing…_

* * *

Naruto comes the night before to see her off. She decides the anger at the invasion of her privacy isn’t worth it, so she decides to feel nothing instead. If he notices the way she keeps drifting away in conversation, he doesn’t point it out. She wonders to herself what kind of leader he’ll be with such an oblivious nature, such an aversion to any kind of conflict that can’t be solved with hitting.

The relief when he leaves is palpable, and she feels another stone of guilt crack into her foundation. In the morning, Sasuke comes with a proposal of marriage laid out like an affidavit and the only words she has the energy to give to him today are simple.

“No, thank you,” she says, and closes the door, feeling no guilt whatsoever. _How curious._ She finishes packing and leaves. He’s sitting on the bench in the garden with all the certainty her old self built up in him, but she doesn’t look his way even once on her way to the latched gate. She closes it behind her, and the latch makes a rusty squall as it moves.

* * *

_Done with indoor complaints…_

* * *

Privacy is hard to come by in a military society. Everyone knows something about everyone else, and everyone’s dying to find out what everyone else knows. At times, literally.

She settles in to her temporary quarters in Ame, a space the size of her parents’ house back home. Konan took one look at her eyes at the border and upgraded her to a diplomatic suite in the main tower, and a ticket for a full body massage in the evening is shoved meaningfully under her door.

Konan invites her to dinner later. Sakura shows up in her nicest dress, and Konan looks almost relieved that Sakura showed up at all. The assumption might have annoyed her had she not indeed been weighing the consequences of ghosting the leader of a foreign nation.

“I’m pleased you decided to join the committee. To be honest, we weren’t expecting someone of your rank in the medical corp.” Konan passes her a cup full of something warm and alcoholic.

“It was time to get away from everything,” Sakura says, bracing herself for another lecture on throwing away her life to go on “whimsical adventures.” Her mother had found out about Sasuke, and sent a letter the same night Sakura departed.

But Konan only nods slowly, her eyes full of gentle understanding. The invitation starts a pattern, and Sakura takes dinner with Konan every Thursday for her first year in Ame.

* * *

_Still here I carry my old delicious burdens…_

* * *

“What are you doing here?” She doesn’t mean to sound so blunt. Being this long away from formal politics, she forgets her place. The delegates for the response committee have taken to playing cards together on the weekend, and by now everyone’s on a given-name basis. 

“I was the one who commissioned this program. I’m here to assess its progress.” Thankfully, Gaara has never been one to enforce hierarchy. Sakura wonders how much of that is ignorance and how much of that is cunning. There is power, of course, in pretending one hasn’t any.

“I see.” She doesn’t know why he keeps staring at her like that, but has some sort of idea when he asks her to take lunch with him the following day. He starts showing up monthly after that, and when she accepts his lunch offers repeatedly she convinces herself that this is what she’s been searching for to fill the void in her heart.

* * *

_I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them…_

* * *

She learned patience from Tsunade, and so she exercises it in the same way: contain all rage on the clock, expel all rage off the clock. If that’s the case, Sakura wonders why she feels so exhausted after every lunch date, like she’s already expended all the rage she’ll ever have.

“Naruto told me you decided not to marry the Uchiha. Why is that?” He looks at her seriously, and again she wonders how much is ignorance and how much is cunning. He wouldn’t have made it this long as a leader had he no tact whatsoever. He’s playing a game, and she intends to win it.

“Naruto needs to mind his own business. That mouth of his is going to get Konoha into trouble if he doesn’t learn when to shut up.” She looks up at him from her food and the spark of amusement in his eyes irritates her profoundly. 

“I suppose you’re right. But you didn’t answer my question.” The corner of his mouth bunches up and she can’t tell if it’s a smirk or nothing at all.

_Because you shouldn’t have asked it, nosy-ass._ “That’s true. I didn’t answer your question.” She finishes eating her very expensive salad. Gaara shifts back into place, humming thoughtfully, but he doesn’t press her on the matter for the rest of the hour, returning to the far more comfortable topic of cholera outbreaks in the more remote settlements.

* * *

_The east and the west are mine…_

* * *

She doesn’t know why she expects him to just show up on one of the committee’s delegatory visits to a tiny border village suffering from poor aid distribution. Maybe because it was in Sand, but mostly because for the past six months he _just_ so happened to show up at no less than ten excursions with the excuse that he wanted to inspect progress.

The other members had taken her to teasing her about her “important boyfriend,” too used to her glares by now to be cowed into submission. 

It shouldn’t have been that big of a deal, but resentment begins brewing in the pit of her stomach that scares her more than the nothingness she’d felt before. She realizes Gaara himself wasn’t the problem when Naruto is the one to crash land into the village and the same ugly feelings creep up and down her limbs.

“I just want something to be for _me_ , Naruto.” He hadn’t taken a demand to account for his presence as well as Gaara, and she hates the way she feels obligated to explain her impatience with him.

He looks out over the village, to the line of mostly small children waiting for their treatment from her. They’re all delighted he’s here. Their savior. “This _is_ for you, Sakura. I don’t mean to make you feel smothered. I just wanted to see how you were doing. You haven’t written in weeks, you know.”

And there’s that guilt again. “I’ve been busy.”

“Yeah.” He glances toward her feet, and his avoidance of her eyes disturbs her. Naruto had never been one for subtleties. “I think we all have.”

She waits for him to say anything else, half hoping he’ll leave and half hoping he’ll stay. She wishes he hadn’t come at all. But watching him shift back and forth on his feet in obvious discomfort is worst, and so she pulls up a crate for him to sit on and watch her work. She feels unmoored, having started this day with a ghost of her old cheery optimism only to end it in turbulence.

“Sasuke misses you. He doesn’t say anything but I think he’s waiting for...well, you know.”

“Okay.”

She feels like a pretender.

* * *

_Divesting myself of the holds that would hold me…_

* * *

“I said no because I didn’t want to be married at eighteen. I don’t know why that’s so scandalous to all of you.” She practically throws herself into the chair across from the Kazekage and enjoys a moment of terrible glee at the rare look of shock briefly illuminating his face.

“Oh.” He pours her a drink quickly, and a she shoves down a million questions and accusations jumbling her mind.

She shrugs. She won’t apologize for her forwardness. He shouldn’t have asked in the first place. “And I’m not really into Sasuke anymore. It was just a child’s crush. Honestly, my attraction to him in the first place is a great illustration of how sexuality is not a choice.”

He actually laughs at that, and she wonders where this newfound give-no-fucks attitude would have gotten her at age twelve. The imperial city, maybe. Didn’t men love spirited women they thought they could still control? Ah, but she’s too young for bitterness that set-in. That’s just the shishou talking.

“I enjoy spending time with you,” he says, and because she’s watching for it she doesn’t miss the way he bounces his leg just the slightest amount, the way his hand trembles for a moment before he sets it resolutely on the tabletop.

Sakura thinks she should excuse herself then, back to her room and then back to Konoha forever, back to a much safer destiny. She gives him the spare key to her suite instead.

* * *

_Now if a thousand perfect men were to appear it would not amaze me…_

* * *

Seducing the kazekage isn’t even a necessity, because she can tell the moment she answers her door what he’s here for. Certainty washes over her like a soothing balm, because this at least makes sense. She hopes he’s good enough to provide her with pleasant distraction, and smart enough not to linger too much the next morning. What she isn’t prepared for is all the rest.

“I love you,” he says. “I’ve loved you since the last day of the war, and all the days since then.” She squeezes her eyes shut. Somehow, this had never factored into her life plan. Since day one, she’d always been the one to chase after love. She isn’t so sure what to think, being on the other side. 

All the feelings she had right after the final battle, the _get away run away hide from the thousands of eyes watching you waiting for you to settle into your place_ and the smaller but ever present _you’ll never be good enough on your own_ come back with a vengeance.

He places a line of kisses up her spine, dividing her back neatly in two and she wants to rip herself apart at the feel of it. Who will she be if she gives in? _Give in to what?_ The contentment. _The feeling of nothingness._

She presses her face into the mattress so he won’t see her crying, and she tells him to stay the night so he won’t see that anything is wrong. She isn’t certain of anything anymore.

* * *

_Here is the test of wisdom…_

* * *

She swallows her pride on a Thursday, telling Konan everything, though Sakura suspects the older woman knows most of it already. 

“Are you happy?” Konan asks. Sakura doesn’t know. The empty feeling takes up so much space, she isn’t sure if anything else is fit to move about the hollow space of her heart. 

“Do you regret it?” Not the sex, not really. And she feels a little guilty about that, because shouldn’t she? Was she lying to him? He hadn’t pressed for an answer to his confession, not on the first night or on any of the nights since. They still have their regular lunches, only now he doesn’t move away when their legs accidentally touch under the table.

Occasionally there is a prickle of a thought that feels like fear, but before she can ruminate on it for too long it gets shoved down with the rest of her emotions whenever a colleague gives her a knowing wink. She shrugs again. It’s tricky to explain a lack of something.

“It must be hard, feeling like every move you make is watched. I used to be able to hide behind my title. Back when the Salamander’s body still ruled this land, it was easier. Now?” Konan herself shrugs, but it’s with a wry acceptance. “It’s different. But I’m happy. What makes _you_ happy?”

Sakura takes pause, and she makes a choice. The one she’d been too timid to make in Tsunade’s little closet of an office last year. 

“There’s a section of my contract that mentions extended field work. I’d like to apply it to my current project.”

Konan reaches into her pocket and pulls out the paperwork. She’s already signed her part of it.

* * *

_Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road…_

* * *

She’s gone for five years.

She writes to Tsunade and Konan regularly, because she has to or they’ll send the trackers after her. She writes to Naruto irregularly, because he’d be surly about it for the rest of their lives if she didn’t. She writes one letter to Gaara but doesn’t send it, and burns it in a campfire instead, watching the paper curl up into nothing.

The western mountain ranges are her biggest challenge and she nearly dies several times, to her great embarrassment. Mountain survival training for Konoha’s forces based itself on the lower peaks of Lightning and Earth territories, not these jagged peaks that even clouds passed under. 

She makes it to the other side only by following a small herd of mountain goats to a water source, which she follows down the slope to a tiny hamlet on the banks of what quickly became a river. Predictably, they don’t speak her language, but they’re friendly enough once she shows them the magic of her glowing hands. A queue quickly forms of people suffering maladies of all sorts.

A matriarch offers Sakura a place in her home for the time being, which Sakura accepts gratefully with a bow. Dinner in this house is raucous and full of peering eyes, but for the first time in a while Sakura isn’t bothered at all. When the matriarch passes her some sweet drink at the end of the meal, Sakura accepts with a smile and feels a bit of her heart fill in again.

* * *

_These are the days that must happen to you…_

* * *

Sweat makes her skin slick in the midday sun, but she hasn’t worried about the way she looks in a while. To these people, she may well always be an oddity. She works the garden behind the hamlet’s largest building, a multi-purpose community room that held meetings, or, more commonly, loud arguments. 

Her hands are full of dirt and fertilizer and fragile new medicinal plants that she presses lovingly into the earth. She knows it’s a bit late in the summer for them to complete their entire growth cycle, but the matriarch insists there will be something to harvest in the fall to make it worth it. She wonders if she’ll stick around to see what they look like in bloom. 

_This plant,_ the matriarch tells her in the halting mix of languages they’ve devised, _grows differently in the late season. In spring all they give us are seeds. The resin only comes when the weather turns cold._

“But it never reaches its full height.”

_Does anything?_

“I guess not.”

* * *

_You shall not allow the hold of those who spread their reach’d hands toward you…_

* * *

A few cities down the river she sees a red-haired man and nearly breaks something in her mad dash to hide. It’s only a when the man leaves that she realizes it isn’t Him, and that if it were, it wouldn’t make any sense for him to be here like this: alone with no entourage, strolling aimlessly through a market in a far-flung country on a Sunday morning. She invites the innkeeper’s daughter to her bed that night and feels an odd mixture of relief and unsettlement at the lack of passionate love confessions.

* * *

_Speaking of any thing else but never of itself..._

* * *

“I don’t know,” she tells the nurse. In a strange coincidence she meets another migrating soul from the Five Nations, this one a former battle medic who wandered off after the Third War. Her eyes are kind and knowing, and she reminds Sakura so much of Tsunade that she almost cries.

“I don’t know,” she says again. “I feel like I’m just running from all these things, but I don’t know what I’m running _from._ Does that make any sense?”

“Of course. I found myself here, after all.” This woman doesn’t hand her alcohol-- _Too many bad choices with the drink after the war, my dear--_ but a pastry, one fresh from that morning. “There is a safety in a place where you are not seen.”

“Was it the watching? I couldn’t stand it. Just...everyone looking at me like they _knew_ me, and knowing I was supposed to feel a certain way and didn’t. I couldn’t--couldn’t stand it. I didn’t want the things I was supposed to be wanting.”

The woman looks at her with her head tilted to the side, regarding. “And then you felt trapped, yes? If you did what They wanted, you’d be letting Them _win._ If you did what They didn’t want, it would still feel like They controlled you, because you’d still be choosing based on the foundation They built. And then They win again. Every choice feels like a reaction to someone else.”

“Yes,” Sakura whispers. 

“It’s a trap.” The woman slides her another pastry, and it’s only then that Sakura realizes she ate hers without tasting it. “You’ll live in there forever, always wondering if the choices you make are real, because everything will feel like it’s in support or rebellion or someone else’s plan for you. You’ll live your whole life feeling empty because you never feel comfortable with your own choices. Even your own thoughts can become the enemy, after a while. You’ll wonder if you’ll ever be able to truly live for yourself.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Understand that your choices will never be made without context. And then make them anyway.”

* * *

_You hardly settle yourself to satisfaction before you are call’d by an irresistible call to depart…_

* * *

The mountains are easier after the five-year gap. She knows now how to navigate them, through her own experience and through the very helpful guidebook that the veteran gave her. She isn’t planning on getting hiker’s disease this time, if she can help herself.

So, she lingers. Between two peaks she finds a silent valley full of empty, woven bird’s nests among the pines. Likely already flown away with their progeny to warmer weather. She knows winter is coming, but she still has time to walk slowly, to savor the journey this time around.

Two weeks in, she meets a pair of shinobi from the Hidden Sand who recognize her immediately, and she’s surprised at the loneliness that hits her when they speak her name first as a greeting. It isn’t the harsh anger from before, but something softer. More accepting, and desirous of company. She greets them in return and settles into their camp, hands already at the ready when one begins rolling up a pant leg to expose a nasty infection. In the morning they leave to complete their mysterious errand. 

She stays behind and camps another week, telling herself that the delay is entirely due to the necessity of sorting her stock of seeds another time. She sorts through the memories of the war, too, and that comes easier than it ever has before. She remembers the freedom of her childhood and the cage of her battle success and what it meant to her then, wanting to decide what it means to her now.

She isn’t surprised at all to see who’s waiting for her at the border of Wind where it touches the mountain base.

* * *

_Have the past struggles succeeded? What has succeeded? yourself? your nation?_

* * *

He understands that she never wants to stay for long, and she knows this by the way he looks at her without sadness every time she leaves. She lets his touch linger on her skin as she dresses herself to wander the mountains again, her indulgence permitted through the value of her samples she hauls back and a fair bit of nepotism.

She ignores the whispers and stares because she can, and the confused pleas from her friends back home because she must. 

* * *

_Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?_

* * *

He goes with her once, leaving his village in Temari’s capable hands. There was a time his companionship would have threatened her fragile freedom and sent the delicate thing between them shattering like glass on stone. Now, she relishes in the way he looks at her and _knows_ her not because he’s seen what she can do, but because he stayed long enough for her to tell him who she is.

She shows him her hidden valley and they watch pairs of birds weaving nests together, only some of them successful. The younger couples, as indicated by their shorter feather crowns, are having a rough go at it.

“They nest in the cactuses over winter,” he tells her. “In a species with spines so thick that nothing else touches them. The weavers twist their way through the spines and live in the hollowed-out places that the bugs make in the summer.”

She almost doesn’t go back when he does, knowing that if she told him not to wait on her that he would accept this without question. But as he turns she takes his hand, and she hesitates, feeling her cheeks warm a bit. She pushes through the awkwardness, because it’s been a long time since she’s been this full of emotion. He smiles at her, and entwines his fingers with hers.

She knows this isn’t the last trip, and that over days or weeks or months the desire to run will come back again. The emptiness still haunts her from time to time, and the watching, and she isn’t _fixed,_ and she knows she never will be because there isn’t such a thing.

But for now she feels content to kiss him in the light of the fire kindled at her old campsite. She doesn’t know if this is _it,_ if this is how she’s _meant_ to be. She pulls him closer all the same and quiets her racing thoughts to simply live in the moment, with nothing but the birds to watch her wrap herself around him.

* * *

_Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?_

**Author's Note:**

> Gonna go back and edit this later because I wrote it all at once in two days because if I don't do that then the inspiration leaves forever. #ADHD life
> 
> Gonna work on my other stuff I've been wanting to get to, just had to slog my way out of seasonal depression. See, this is why now I only post things when they're all finished.


End file.
